Into the Light

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"Skating cost a lot of money," Danny says, "and it was a burden for everyone in the family. We were taking the kids skating from five to eight a.m., and then I'd go to work, and they'd go to school. I told them, I don't mind doing it, but you have to make a commitment. In five years you can become a senior skater. We always had that as the goal. So every six months we scheduled tests."

Michelle finds nothing (except waterskiing, which is off-limits) better than a day on Lake Arrowhead with dad and brother, Ron.   ROBERT BECK

There are eight levels in women's singles skating and eight tests to pass to move from the lowest level, pre-preliminary, to the highest, senior ladies. Most girls spend a year at each level, mastering the requisite jumps and spins and spirals. Not Michelle. "Michelle was going faster than anyone," recalls Karen, who competed in the 1995, '96 and '97 nationals, but now spends most of her time concentrating on her studies at Boston University, where she is a sophomore. "We'd go to Lake Arrowhead for the weekend, which was inspirational, since there was always someone famous skating there, and every weekend she'd learn a new jump. To her it was like walking. We had no vacations. No days off. We skated on Christmas Day. One day I'd be tired. The next day Michelle would be tired. But Dad would tell us, It's your responsibility to do it even when you don't want to. He taught us we had to commit."

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At one point, with skating expenses growing, Danny offered his daughters $50 for every day they didn't skate, figuring it would save him money. Safest $50 he never spent. Michelle skated with a sore throat, runny nose, the flu, even chicken pox. Without a coach at her side, wearing a borrowed dress and secondhand skates, she won a junior regional competition when she was 10. That year Estella and the girls moved to Lake Arrowhead and, helped out by a scholarship from the Ice Castle International Skating Foundation, Michelle and Karen began taking regular private lessons for $25 an hour three days a week. Danny never missed a practice. He would stay at Lake Arrowhead much of the time, watch the girls skate before school, then drive two hours to work and, later, two hours back.

Frank Carroll was the coach. A respected, punctilious mentor, Carroll had plenty of experience with amateur champions, having groomed Linda Fratianne and Christopher Bowman. When he took Michelle to her first national junior competition, in 1992, she finished a disappointing ninth. Carroll wanted her to stay a junior until she gained more maturity and polish. But Michelle had all the jumps necessary to compete at the senior level, and in May '92, two months before her 12th birthday, unbeknownst to Carroll, she passed her senior test—four years and 10 months after Danny had made it a goal for her to move to seniors within five years. Carroll was furious. "It was an honest mistake," Danny says. "We'd only known Frank four months, and I thought Michelle had told him about it. The only thing she wanted was to be a senior and compete against the big guys."

Carroll told his prodigy she had to work doubly hard if she didn't want to embarrass herself in seniors, which was like asking a swallow to fly. Michelle bought into the program. "I like my schedule to be jam-packed," she says. "I didn't want to finish my homework and watch four hours of TV. I wanted to get to the 1994 Olympics."

Her father had told her that a person's life was like a house. You couldn't have all the windows open at once. For Michelle, only two windows were flung wide: her education (now a senior in high school, she has a 3.4 grade point average and hopes to attend Harvard and study law) and her skating. The window to her social life was open only a crack. The window to waterskiing, which Danny deemed too dangerous but Michelle longed to try, wasn't open at all. "Skating takes up 70 percent of my time," Michelle says. "School about 25 percent. Having fun and talking to my friends, five percent. It's hard. I envy other kids a lot of things, but I get a guilt trip when I'm not training."

Kwan thrived under Carroll's disciplined guidance. His rules, for example, permitted no stopping in the middle of a program in practice, not even after a fall. In 1993 Kwan, then 12, got attention by becoming the youngest senior competitor at nationals in 20 years (she finished sixth), then winning the U.S. Olympic Festival. The Nancy Kerrigan-Tonya Harding tempest occurred at the '94 nationals, where Kwan finished second to Harding after Kerrigan was forced to withdraw. The U.S. Figure Skating Association named Kerrigan to the Olympic team anyway, with the 13-year-old Kwan as first alternate. Had the U.S. Olympic Committee, fearful of a lawsuit, not backed off its efforts to throw Harding off the team, Kwan would have achieved the goal she'd set for herself at age seven.

As an eighth-grader Kwan left school to be privately tutored. In addition she hired her own manager, Shep Goldberg, further signifying that the big time was just around the bend. In 1995 Kwan finished second at the nationals again, this time behind Nicole Bobek, but improved to fourth at the world championships. Then came 1995-96, Kwan's breakthrough season. Skating in the role of the temptress Salome, wearing makeup and a braided-bun hairstyle designed to make her appear more mature to the judges, she skated far beyond her 15 years, winning both the nationals and the worlds, at which she scored her first two 6.0s. She needed them, too. China's Lu Chen had scored a pair of 6.0s before Kwan's long program, leaving no room for error. It was an early sign that as limpid as Kwan appears on the ice, under pressure she has the heart of a champion.

When Kwan came to the 1997 nationals in Nashville, she was, in her words "on a roll." She'd won nine straight competitions in 11 months and 14 of 15 since the fall of '95, and was being compared to such legends of the sport as Dorothy Hamill and Peggy Fleming. But superb skating is never as easy as the great ones make it appear, and early in her long program Kwan fell on the back end of a combination jump. Then she panicked. She stumbled out of her next jump and fell a second time. The 14-year-old Lipinski, skating flawlessly, won.

Although it was a shocking upset, almost everyone assumed Kwan would bounce back. Instead, Lipinski beat her again at the prestigious Champions Series Final and a third time at the '97 worlds in Lausanne, Switzerland. In each event Kwan, who would later refer to that period as her "coma," made critical errors while the tiny Lipinski, slightly superior technically but artistically far behind, skated cleanly. "Michelle lost her confidence after the nationals," says Karen. "That was her first bad skate in two or three years, and it didn't help that other people began comparing her to Tara. Michelle had never been compared to anyone before. She'd always been the one who was coming up."

Kwan found herself skating not with an eye on improving but to maintain her standing at the top, so she could win the gold medal in 1998. "She loved the sport until she was about 15," says Danny, "but then it became the podium and winning that she loved. She lost the purity of a kid."

"I'm glad last year happened," Michelle says. "Everything had happened so fast, I didn't appreciate what I'd already done. I didn't enjoy it. I was so worried about winning, it was as if I was caught up in my own web. I kept asking myself, Why am I here if I don't love it? Why am I torturing myself? It's supposed to be fun, and I thought I'd die if I didn't win."

Kwan found herself in this desperate frame of mind at last year's worlds. She had failed to skate cleanly in the short program and stood in fourth place with little chance of catching Lipinski. Tugging on her shoelaces in the dressing room after the short program, Kwan smacked herself in the face when one broke. She started to cry, but in a moment the sobs turned to laughter. It had been an emotional week. Bobek's coach, Carlo Fassi, had died of a heart attack, and Scott Hamilton had announced he was being treated for cancer. Suddenly Kwan realized that a fall on a combination jump wasn't life or death. Neither was winning. The key for her, she began to understand, was to rediscover the joy she'd felt while skating. When she won the long program two days later, finishing second overall to Lipinski, she described herself as "the happiest silver medalist ever."

Recharged and refocused, Kwan is on another roll now. Both times she has faced Lipinski this season, in Skate America and at the nationals, she has easily beaten her. Lipinski is now the one who is falling on jumps she routinely landed before she was champion, while Kwan is skating with the unfettered delight of a kid. In both her short program, performed to Rachmaninoff's Finale, and her long program, skated to William Alwyn's Lyra Angelica, Kwan portrays herself, rather than a character like Salome. "We'd focused on the dramatic side of her personality," says Nichol, who says her "spine went nuts" when she first first heard Lyra Angelica, which she immediately knew was the perfect music for Kwan. "Frank and I had seen that peaceful quality of hers in practice. We just hadn't given her a vehicle to express it."

They have now, and after her dance with perfection in Philadelphia the only question is whether Kwan can do it again. "Michelle's capable of doing these types of performances more than once," says Heiss Jenkins. "She's mentally so strong, she could do it all over again in Nagano."

"She found something out about herself in Philadelphia," says Nichol. "She learned she could feel serenity and joy on the ice, in front of a crowd, in an incredibly pressurized moment. And she did it after having been off the ice almost a month from her injury. She knows now that she can deal with anything, good or bad. She's saying, I was good—now how much better can I be? We've only seen the beginning of what this girl can do.

Issue date: February 9, 1998